The Roots Of Rough Justice

In this deeply researched prequel to his 2006 study Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947, Michael J. Pfeifer analyzes the foundations of lynching in American social history. Scrutinizing the vigilante movements and lynching violence that occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century on the Southern, Midwestern, and far Western frontiers, The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching offers new insights into collective violence in the pre-Civil War era. Pfeifer examines the antecedents of American lynching in an early modern Anglo-European folk and legal heritage. He addresses the transformation of ideas and practices of social ordering, law, and collective violence in the American colonies, the early American Republic, and especially the decades before and immediately after the American Civil War. His trenchant and concise analysis anchors the first book to consider the crucial emergence of the practice of lynching of slaves in antebellum America. Pfeifer also leads the way in analyzing the history of American lynching in a global context, from the early modern British Atlantic to the legal status of collective violence in contemporary Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Seamlessly melding source material with apt historical examples, The Roots of Rough Justice tackles the emergence of not only the rhetoric surrounding lynching, but its practice and ideology. Arguing that the origins of lynching cannot be restricted to any particular region, Pfeifer shows how the national and transatlantic context is essential for understanding how whites used mob violence to enforce the racial and class hierarchies across the United States.

Investigates the pervasive and persistent commitment to "rough justice" that characterized rural and working class areas of most of the United States in the late nineteenth century. This work examines the influence of race, gender, and class on understandings of criminal justice and shows how they varied across regions.

Soon after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the United States captured hundreds of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and around the world. By the following January the first of these prisoners arrived at the U.S. military's prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were subject to President George W. Bush's executive order authorizing their trial by military commissions. Jess Bravin, the "Wall Street Journal"'s Supreme Court correspondent, was there within days of the prison's opening, and has continued ever since to cover the U.S. effort to create a parallel justice system for enemy aliens. A maze of legal, political, and moral issues has stood in the way of justice--issues often raised by military prosecutors who found themselves torn between duty to the chain of command and their commitment to fundamental American values.While much has been written about Guantanamo and brutal detention practices following 9/11, Bravin is the first to go inside the Pentagon's prosecution team to expose the real-world legal consequences of those policies. Bravin describes cases undermined by inadmissible evidence obtained through torture, clashes between military lawyers and administration appointees, and political interference in criminal prosecutions that would be shocking within the traditional civilian and military justice systems. With the Obama administration planning to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators at Guantanamo--and vindicate the legal experiment the Bush administration could barely get off the ground--"The Terror Courts" could not be more timely.

In recent decades, scholars have explored much of the history of mob violence in the American South, especially in the years after Reconstruction. However, the lynching violence that occurred in American regions outside the South, where hundreds of persons, including Hispanics, whites, African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans died at the hands of lynch mobs, has received less attention. This collection of essays by prominent and rising scholars fills this gap by illuminating the factors that distinguished lynching in the West, the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic. The volume adds to a more comprehensive history of American lynching and will be of interest to all readers interested in the history of violence across the varied regions of the United States. Contributors are Jack S. Blocker Jr., Brent M. S. Campney, William D. Carrigan, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Dennis B. Downey, Larry R. Gerlach, Kimberley Mangun, Helen McLure, Michael J. Pfeifer, Christopher Waldrep, Clive Webb, and Dena Lynn Winslow.

The story of the movement to establish the International Criminal Court, its tumultuous first decade, and the challenges it will continue to face in the future.

**NOW IN PAPERBACK, WITH COLOR AND BLACK-AND-WHITE DRAWINGS THROUGHOUT** Alex Ross opens his private sketchbooks to reveal his astonishing pencil and ink drawings of DC Comics characters, nearly all of them appearing in print here for the first time in paperback. Thousands of fans from around the world have thrilled to Alex’s fully rendered photo-realistic paintings of their favorite heroes, but, as they may not realize, all of those works start as pencil on paper, and the origins of the finished images are rarely seen—until now. From deleted scenes and altered panels for the epic Kingdom Come saga to proposals for revamping such classic properties as Batgirl, Captain Marvel, and an imagined son of Batman named Batboy, to unused alternate comic book cover ideas for the monthly Superman and Batman comics of 2008–2009, there is much to surprise and delight those who thought they already knew all of Alex’s DC Comics work. Illuminating everything is the artist’s own commentary, written expressly for this book, explaining his thought processes and stylistic approaches for the various riffs and reimaginings of characters we thought we knew everything about but whose possibilities we didn’t fully understand. As a record of a pivotal era in comics history, Rough Justice is a must-have for Alex’s legion of fans, as well as for anyone interested in masterly comic book imagination and illustration.

Rough Justice is a history of policing and crime in early Newfoundland. It focuses on the period between the appointment of the first constables on the island in 1729 to the establishment of the Newfoundland Constabulary in 1871, now known as the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary. This makes the Constabulary the oldest continuous police service in Canada. This book concentrates on regular constables and their lived experiences in the court system and in the community. These law officers, who were largely ignored by politicians at the time and by historians in recent decades, were critical to making that justice system work. This social and legal study brings their stories to life for the first time. Case studies provide fascinating glimpses into the dangers of law enforcement across the island, not just in St. John's and Conception Bay, but also in rural districts such as Trinity and Placentia. First and foremost, these men, mostly untrained amateurs, were officers of the court, but they also played important roles in some of the most notable historical events and social crises over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The formation of the modern-day Constabulary in 1871 was a significant historical event. Rough Justice focuses on those early policemen.

In Rough Justice, National Serviceman, Corporal Lloyd Freeman, tells how he and a hundred other British soldiers were involved in a tragic barn fire in Austria whilst taking part in manoeuvres with American forces. He escaped but four men died. Many others were seriously injured. The bravery of Austrian fire fighters and the speed of American rescuers and medics prevented many more deaths. The survivors knew how the fire started but were sworn to secrecy. A Military Court of Inquiry was held to discover the cause but the full details were never made public. Fifty years on, the author, who had been one of the soldiers in the barn, obtained the Tribunal documents from the Public Record Office. His discoveries increased his determination to write Rough Justice in which the truth is revealed, together with a realistic plot in which Lloyd Freeman and his mates from training, discover that two battle hardened soldiers intend to wreak vengeance upon the perpetrator.